Voices from the underground
Résumé
Blind, depigmented cave-dwelling creatures have fascinated humans for centuries. This chapter gives an overview at the organismal level of recent research documenting the variety of troglomorphic traits that are specific to groundwater animals. It also introduces the fields and principles of evolutionary developmental biology, or EvoDevo, and comparative genomics for the study of the mechanisms of trait evolution in the dark. Groundwater animals are outstanding models to study the general principles of evolution and the mechanisms of adaptation to a unique environment that represents 97% of the liquid freshwater on earth.